But maybe the book really just is that good. It contains the best description of terrible sex in probably all of literature, followed by… I will just direct you to the last sentence of Chapter 62. a b Robinson, Roxana (2014-09-05). "Between Women". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2023-02-28. The story continues from the point where the previous book stopped, we are reminded that the story is recounted by sixty-six years old Lenu, with her distance and experience. Lenu is drawn into the new cultured world of her fiancé’s family, she’s dazed and fascinated by it and at the same time feels uncertain, constantly seeking approval, making sure she is fits in, meets the expectations. She prepares to get married and move to Florence, happy to leave the neighborhood behind; she promotes her book. It seems Lenu is finally able to exist on her own, until Lila summons her.

If you weren’t put off by this unhelpfully vague review, I urge you to read these books. I have tried to touch on a few reasons why I find them so excellent, but even more than those definable things there is just something about them overall that makes them unforgettable. The Neapolitan novels, in form and content, necessitated for us a consideration of pettiness: of how pettiness, gender, criticism, and politics interact. By way of conclusion, we’d note another sphere where pettiness’s forceful ambivalent power seems necessary to consider: the election of Trump, the world’s pettiest candidate, over Hillary Clinton, a candidate who (because she is a woman, rather than for her questionable politics) was evaluated in the most petty way. Shulevitz, Judith (2015-09-12). "The Hypnotic Genius of Elena Ferrante". The Atlantic . Retrieved 2023-02-27.Moylan, Brian (February 9, 2016). "Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels set for TV adaptation". The Guardian. Pietro Airota (their son, also a professor, and Elena's husband and the father of Elena's two older daughters) Consider our claim that “ taste is just another name for misogyny.” We made this assertion in a listicle of sorts that we created to express our deep love for the Neapolitan novels’ infamously trashy book covers. Rendered in pastels, featuring imagery seemingly drawn straight from the Christian women’s romance section of the bookstore, the book covers, everyone seemed to agree, were at odds with the rigor and insight of the novels themselves. This sentence stages our most polemic claim—“taste is just another name for internalized misogyny”—as a truth claim at the foundation of an argument rather than the argument itself. More, the claim can’t hold, argumentatively: it is out of scale with itself. It contains a multitude of debatable assumptions about how taste, culture, gender, and even psychology work, yet we were uninterested in debating any of them. Because the very fact of having to debate them, carefully, with evidence and expertise, dissipates the deep feelings—of love, of irritation—that the covers cause us to feel and, importantly, what the discussion of the covers lead us to know but to know other than through agreed upon standards of argument. The knowledge, here, came from the accrued feeling of living for years in a world that finds a pastel aesthetic distasteful. Criticism’s carefulness would defuse the power of experience behind this claim. And no one knew better than I did what it meant to make your own head masculine so that it would be accepted by the culture of men; I had done it, I was doing it.”

Enzo Scanno, Lila and Lenù's childhood friend, who starts a relationship with Lila after he helps her leave her abusive marriage. According to The Guardian, this tension goes beyond the relation between Lila and Lenu, encompassing all women in the narrative: "Ferrante's subject – it is almost an obsession – is the way women are shaped, distorted and sometimes destroyed by their social milieu (and by the men around them). Voicing what can still seem unvoiceable, she delves into the darker tensions between daughters and mothers, the tug-and-pull of being a wife or a mother and wanting to retain some sense of independent self." [9] Motherhood and ambivalence [ edit ] Harnett, Emily (2016-07-03). "The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante's Bad Book Covers". The Atlantic . Retrieved 2023-02-27. The novel was adapted by HBO and RaiTV in their series My Brilliant Friend. The content of this novels corresponds to the third season of the show, which aired in February 2022. [1] Plot [ edit ] Jenny Turner, " The Secret Sharer. Elena Ferrante's existential fiction", Harper's Magazine, October 2014.the Neapolitan novels, which are about poor women with restricted access to education (and the class mobility that aesthetic taste enables), look like books that might be sold to poor women with restricted access to education. Note that literati readers love to identify with the characters, Lila and Lenù, who are women who use reading to escape their lives. So why are we so unwilling to consider ourselves to be anything like the women who are Lila and Lenù’s real world reading counterparts? Why are we so determined to stand against their reading practices and aesthetic tastes?

It was praised for its portrayal of an intelligent young woman who finds motherhood stifling, a perspective not often portrayed, as argued by Roxana Robinson in The New York Times: "She (Elena) has joined the intelligentsia and is about to marry into the middle class, yet her life is still rife with limitations. Her distinguished husband is narrow-minded and restrictive, and she finds motherhood numbing." [2]Because obviously these books are gendered, are about gender, are written through, read in, and talked about in a condition of gender. This is difficult to talk about, because gender too is all petty differences. When we leave pettiness for criticism, we feel a pressure to transcend gender’s petty differences into a space where interpretation and meaning can be debated, discussed, and agreed upon. But the thing that’s just true—this is another sweeping, untenable, and necessary claim—is that women lose more, and have more to lose, in that space. I read the first volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet over the span of three weeks, a pace that accelerated as my sense of urgency increased with each cliffhanger. The second volume took one week; the third, three days; and the last, I read between two p.m. and midnight one weekday afternoon starting with the first free moment I had at work. In the third book in the New York Times–bestselling Neapolitan quartet that inspired the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, Elena and Lila have grown into womanhood. Lila married at sixteen and has a young son; she has left her husband and the comforts her marriage brought and now works as a common laborer. Elena has left the neighborhood, earned her college degree, and published a successful novel, all of which has opened the doors to a world of learned interlocutors and richly furnished salons. Both women are pushing against the walls of a prison that would have seen them living a life of misery, ignorance, and submission. They are afloat on the great sea of opportunities that opened up for women during the 1970s. And yet, they are still very much bound to each other in a book that “shows off Ferrante’s strong storytelling ability and will leave readers eager for the final volume of the series” ( Library Journal). In this low-migration period, virtually all age cohorts have been less mobile. And that includes people in their peak migratory years which, right now, happens to be millennials. These are the people who would normally return. It fell in line with the research showing it was racism and sexism that drove Trump's rise, not economic dissatisfaction. And it paints the picture of people who are so insular that they won't leave their hometown, even when economic conditions are subpar.

The first is looking at migration patterns over different age groups. It shows people in their late teens and early 20s are the most likely to migrate — and they generally leave their smaller towns and suburbs to live in the urban core, whether for school or work. And rural communities are hurt most by this movement: Elena Ferrante's Naples: A Visual Promenade." Le Nouvel Observateur, October 28, 2016. A tour of the novels' Neapolitan settings. The Neapolitan Novels, also known as the Neapolitan Quartet, are a four-part series of fiction by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, published originally by Edizioni e/o, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, and published by Europa Editions (New York). The English-language titles of the novels are My Brilliant Friend (2012), The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). In the original Italian edition, the whole series bears the title of the first novel L'amica geniale ("My Brilliant Friend"). The series has been characterized as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. [1] In an interview in Harper's Magazine, Elena Ferrante has stated that she considers the four books to be "a single novel" published serially for reasons of length and duration. [2] The series has sold over 10 million copies in 40 countries. [3] The break in production because of the pandemic allowed this adaptation of Elena Ferrante's Those Who Leave And Those To Stay to feel even more authentic. For most of this book the narrator, Elena Greco, is trapped in restless domesticity on the edge of a new life that fails to satisfy. Naples, with its entwined, familiar lives, is faded into a distance made foggy by new responsibilities in Florence.Another possibility is that the irritation is a historical symptom. The years of Ferrante fever in the United States have coincided with the collapse of things more generally—politically, psychologically, informationally. We exist in a state now where the ability to demonstrate or assert what is “best that is known” is under particular stress. It’s clear that criticism in our present time—the best that is known, consensual knowledge—has a vital role. We often talk about the rural-urban split in America — between country folk and city folk. But this distinction misses a nuance: Americans are some of the most frequent migrants in the world; we don't attach ourselves to a set geography. Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on. And more, we think of Lila, in the Neapolitan novels, speaking in public about the abuse and harassment experienced in the factory, and the sexual form it takes for women, and then facing, in private, Enzo’s well-meaning concern: does this happen to you? he asks. Admitting the forcefulness of woman as a sign, here, its universality, would be for Lila tantamount to taking on another womanly task: comforting men who, like Matthew McConaughey looking mournfully at pictures of rape victims in True Detective, are burdened with the difficulty of living as men in a world where men do, over and over, such terrible things to women. We love Lila for being too tired to give a shit. Exhausted, she lies to Enzo: oh no, nothing untoward ever happens to her at her workplace, just because she’s a woman, just because it happens to every woman. Nope: everything is fine. Guardian Staff (2019-09-21). "The 100 best books of the 21st century". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 2019-11-08.